Looking back at your preliminary task, what do you feel you have learnt in the progression from it to the full product?

I consider my progression from my preliminary task to my actual media product has been evident and I feel I have learnt many things on this journey. At the start of the preliminary task I consider my skills were pretty basic as was my sense of my knowledge and the actual ideas from the brief were, I consider limiting. There was limited room for creative ideas in the preliminary task unlike the full product which allowed room to explore the conventions of the thriller genre opening sequences and to use or defer from them. I can split the progression and what I have learnt into the three different stages of film-making pre-production, production and post-production.

The reasearch and planning progression has seen the vast improvements in my knowledge. The preliminary task reasearch consited of minimal thinking and minimal research this was partly due to there being a strict product brief in place. However as this was the first stage that I had to plan or research into a media product, consequently everything that was achieved was learnt. The planning was formulating the lines of dialogue between the characters and where and how these would be spoken. Looking back now I can say that my planning was an area where I learnt about dialogue and how to represent what I wanted into my media product. The full media product has seen major improvements in both research and planning which included, questionnaires, analysing media products both in the opening sequence and the title analysis. All of this research has taught me about the conventions of the thriller opening sequences as well as title sequences. The planning aspect of my full product involved taking what I had learnt in the research and adapting it to what I wanted to achieve in my media product. I used brainstorming, storyboarding, location scouting and clothes and props planning.

The production phase saw the same sort of techniques and knowledge as the preliminary to the full media product. However, I developed my use of the technology in the preliminary task to my full media product, for example the use of shot focus. In addition my progressions in filming techniques have been in many areas: for the preliminary task I used a still camera angle in all of the three shots. The development to the full media product included the incoperation of tracking shots following the runner, as well as zooms and the pulling in and out of focus. The focusing in my final media production is shown on the right as thew runner comes from out of focus to in.

The post-production followed a similar trend with developments of my skills throughout, from the basic preliminary task of shot and reverse shot. The full product has seen the use of many more editing and post production techniques for example fade in and fade out both at the start and the end of the product. The main progression from the preliminary task to the full media product was the incorperation of titles in the second product. This is where I learnt the most and developed the precision of my skills. The skills I had learnt in the preliminary task have just been developed and refined for example I knew the editing technique to cut a clip to a required length however I progressed to be able to use the ripple delete technique to delete more efficiently. The picture to the right of the paragraph shows me using the fade in during Adobe Premiere Pro. The highlighted skill is called cross dissolve and reaches the affect of the a black screen fading into the start of the media product.
The shots below show my preliminary task on the shot reverse shot that I used.

The overall progression from the preliminary task to my full media product I consider as being the progression of my basic skills to a more advanced level and with the A2 course they will be advanced further as I’m allowed time with the specific equipment to understand and learn about it.

The music that was used in my media product was very influential in attracting the 15-45 categories. It was a classical, peaceful, serene piece of music that appealed to the top bracket of the 15-45 categories which would be more likely to listen to that type of music. This music would be less known by the lower brackets of the categories unless they were into this type of music genre.

 The characters as well cover nearly the entire spectrum of the category as I have both a mix from the younger ages of the category in the form of the jogger and also the victim which has a less dominate role but will still be portrayed and therefore people can relate to this. The perceived view in that the first actor the young jogger is seen can also relate to anyone outside of the bracket that indulges in physical activities or running especially. Another way in which people outside my target category of 15-45 can be attracted by my media product is through the feeling of loss. This is through the jogger seeming to find someone they know either dead or hurt and a feeling of loss is created. This is possibly the deepest and strongest attraction that an audience can gain from my media product.